


your mouth the shape of an open wound

by moltenichor



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Kevin Day Deserves Nice Things, What am I doing, also, apparently that's not a tag yet, he deserves them, i should've kept it, in which i have no clue what i'm doing, it's a fitting title, please, someone tell me, the working title for this was: kevin day character study bc i have feels??? okay???, this is weird you should ignore it & me, which is weird bc you should let my child have nice things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 14:04:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12110334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moltenichor/pseuds/moltenichor
Summary: In which it wasn’t meant to be a tragedy, but here we are now.





	your mouth the shape of an open wound

Being a Raven means that nothing is individual, nothing is yours, or some things are, but not much. And those things, you have to grip those things tight and press them into your bones and not let anyone snatch it from your hands. You can’t let anyone steal it, you can’t.

There are precious few things that you owns that are all yours: the letter your mother wrote you, the way your hands link with Thea’s in stolen rare moments, the private quirk of Riko’s lips. The Ravens jersey that says your name on the back.

This wasn’t supposed to be a tragedy, you think. It wasn’t.

.

Okay so it started when your mother was with your father (can you call Wymack your father, even in your own thoughts? It feels like the word weighs down your tongue, sometimes. Or maybe you’re thinking too much about arbitrary things, like the Foxes jeer sometimes) and your mother didn’t love your father but it was _something_ , she wrote. Something like fluttering butterflies and the girlhood she’d shrugged off long ago, but then she cast it off again and left.

And she wrote _I had a child and it was David’s_ and your heart thudded against the back of your clavicle.

But that’s not where you’re at yet, because there was an accident and there was the Nest with its oppressive darkness and the walls seemed to close in on you and you grew used to it, though. Exy was so much before (Exy was the brutal smile carving its way over Mom’s face and the way she lifted you up and whooped when her team won and the way she took you to the field and taught you how to hold a racquet, but—) but then, now,  it’s everything.

The Master tells you _be better_ and you say _yes, Master_ and tell yourself to become something better, _be better_ . and you do, you do, you empty out your guts until there’s emptiness filling you but it doesn’t matter because _Exy_. Exy is pushing itself into your marrow.

(You find the letter but it doesn’t change anything because there’s not much it could change. You read the letter until the words imprint themselves inside your eyelids, but it doesn’t change anything)

And then Riko, Riko pressed always to your side—he likes knives. Riko likes pulling people apart and learning how they tick and ruining them. so he’s ruining you, so he’s slipping blades under your skin and watching as you bleed and not regretting it. But you stay pressed to his side and maybe fear is clawing its way up your throat at him but you smile charming and fake at the press anyways.

You sneer jokes with the Ravens, bandage Jean’s wounds, stay with Riko when he’s spitting blood and furious at the Master (and you bleed, you bleed, you bleed, but that’s not the point). You take the days are they come. and  your sixteen hour days turn and maybe the sun is making its cycle, embracing the moon outside, but does it matter? (an old Raven joke: _even the unstoppables of nature  bend to the Master, what choice do we have?_ so maybe it’s falls too flat, is said with too-hard eyes to be a joke. You laugh savagely with the others anyways)

So this is your life and it is not a good one, no, but it's survival. Letting yourself want more than that is dangerous.

.

Okay, okay, so let’s talk for just one moment about you because Riko’s melded into you and you into him, but _you_. You want to be a person, in your dark corners and quiet silences. You want to learn to breathe and you want to be a person and you want to build yourself from clay and mold shapes into what you are.

When you were five or six or seven or so young you can barely remember, Riko promised _we’re going to be legends_ with a careful marker on your skin and you kept your eyes wide open when you said _yes_ . You said _yes_.

And I could call you a victim, I could talk about every time the Master left blood leaking from your back and left you lying on the ground trying to make your lungs give you air, but let me talk about that—you wanted to make your own narrative. you wanted to tear away from anything anyone would have expected and you wanted a racquet in your hands and you wanted your mouth the shape of something savage and you wanted to be more than a person.

 _so make your own narrative_ , Andrew says, or maybe not in in those words, but his mocking eyes.

You say, _it isn’t that simple_.

Neil asks _why not?_

.

The ERC says something about Riko holding you back, the Master watches you with narrowed eyes, and Riko is furious. This wasn’t meant to be a tragedy, it wasn’t, but here you are now.

There’s a sick crunch when a racquet collides with bone at full strength, you’d never heard it like this before, but here you are now.

.

The night that Riko breaks your arm, you drag yourself to Wymack’s hotel room and leave a trail of wet red trailing behind you. The night that Riko breaks your arm, you don’t have a choice (you hate not having choices), you aren’t a Raven, you’re nothing. You think you’re nothing.

But you build yourself back up from the ground, you do. You take clay, wet and moldable in your hands, and you form it into the shapes of a person. Here—here is the mangled left hand and no it’s not perfect but you can make it work. You can make it work.

Andrew’d sneered at you about Exy and obsessions but you’d never managed tell him in a way he understood that Exy is everything. That you were gutted and Exy leaked into the hole in your stomach, But maybe it doesn’t matter maybe because you’re vomiting up everything you’d been forced into, and you’re growing back what you’d lost and _here you are now_.

So, one time, Bee smiles at you over a cup of hot chocolate and asks _wouldn’t you think that developing other interests is healthy_ and you say, flatly, _no_. it almost sounds like blasphemy—the last time you’d went to a church had been the day before the accident and there’d sound of the priest and laying your head on your mother’s lap, and when you were seven you’d said that Exy could be a religion and Riko’d said that of course it was with an eyeroll (his name keeps showing up in you but was there ever a choice about that? You two spent a lifetime wrapped around each other; you feel cold now ).

Bee says, _you mentioned you like photography, right? Maybe taking a class could help you_. You say that you’ll consider it and it’s almost like your fingers trip when you sign up, because you didn’t think you would but—but you wanted to. And maybe this is what it feels like to be able to want things without swallowing it back down, you think. Maybe.

So this is life after the Ravens; this is life divorced from everything that matters.

And Riko fractured one of your ribs once and just looked back down at you clawing for breath beneath him and there was something vicious in his eyes. You think sometimes that that rib’s never healed.

So you take a photography class.

You sit in those lectures with hands curled around a pen and you take your photos. You like places, you always have, just letting history seep into your mouth and the quiet of them, but you like taking pictures of people more—you like taking these ferocious things and you like making them into pieces, into just bones and sinew and blood and skin, making them human again. Until you’re not afraid of anything anymore.

You have pictures of—the curve of Aaron’s spine, the bumps of his vertebrae under soft fabric, and of the way Nicky’s mouth eases into something gentle when he calls Erik, and of Dan and Matt’s fingers twining together loosely, and of what the court makes Neil, and of Andrew’s quiets. This is—something, you think.

Sometimes your brain floods with panic and tells you the Master will have your head for it, will place your neck onto a guillotine and behead you and leave your head to fall lolling on the ground because you were never important even if your Exy was. And Exy is all that matters, of course, Exy sank its claws into your flesh and coiled itself between your ribs a lifetime ago. You stare at a mirror and curl your hands around a filthy sink, clutching for dear life.

 _Exy is all that matters_.

Is it, anymore?

.

Maybe it doesn't have to be a tragedy.

You think _this is what it means to have a choice_ , and it tastes like shackles falling loose. You think you're learning how to be a person again.


End file.
